Never judging books by their cover

The Consequence of Love Book Tour – Writing About Love

by Bronagh on September 25, 2017

On the book tour for Sandra Howard’s new book,’The Consequence Of Love’, Sandra talks about writing about love.

What do you do when you cannot get somebody out of your mind? You’ve been emotionally involved, lived and breathed and given your all to one person; he was everything to you, the one you truly loved. You’d joked and laughed and thought as one, involved yourself in his work; shared and stood by him in a crisis he found himself in, an eruption of frightening circumstances, which had eventually caused him to have to leave the country. You’d waved him away, loving his bravery and vowing fierce, unswerving loyalty all the while before he could return. He’d left your life and disappeared.

You’d kept in touch, but then suddenly and incomprehensibly your line of communication had gone dead. There seemed no rhyme or reason for it, but you’d lost all contact. The man you loved had simply vanished into thin air and your life had lost all meaning. Then when the months had gone by, a year, and you’d had to accept the fact that he could be dead, in some dreadful hole, in love with with or married to someone else, you’d finally lost faith and turned to another in your despair.

But the emotional ties with the past are too strong. You’ve married, settled down, had one child and then another, you have a good life, a good rewarding job, but still you cannot forget. There’d been no closure, no explanation, no chance to grieve, and in very private moments you still yearn and dream. The ties are unbreakable, the man you truly love is still in your blood stream and your husband knows.

I came to write ‘The Consequence of Love’ because I wanted to know what, my character, Nattie, would do if after seven long years with no contact, her true love returned to his homeland and sought her out. He would be desperate to find her again and explain, I wanted to know what had happened to him in all that time, why he’d disappeared, and of course the outcome, what would be the consequence of his return.
I knew him well, he was the hero of the novel I’d written over seven years ago called ‘A Matter of Loyalty’ and a number of readers had got in touch to say how much they too wanted to know how things had worked out.

The one thing I’ve learned about writing fiction is how impossibly hard it is to let go. The characters take over, they lead you by the hand, do things you wouldn’t have expected and lead you down strange and wonderful paths. They become part of the family. Some of them continued through my first three books and now, with ‘The Consequence of Love’, seven years on, we’ve been reunited again.

You can buy The Consequence of Love from Amazon and is available to buy from good bookshops.